Haas F1 Team Principal Guenther Steiner is pleased with the progress the squad has made so far this season, and with updates filtering through on a regular basis the Italian is confident they will continue to improve race by race.
Having gathered some good data regarding the Barcelona track during pre-season testing, Steiner is looking forward to going to the Circuit de Catalunya and seeing the progress the American team have made.
“It’s one of the things we look forward to because we can compare what we’ve got now with what we started off with. We finally have something to compare ourselves to. On all the other tracks, we’ve got no data at all, and we’ll have no data at all until we come back next year. So, it’s quite nice to go to Barcelona.
“There’s no real advantage. It’s just a reality check. We can check what we’ve done over the last four races. The team has made significant steps. It’s a very good thing that we’re growing and making improvements. We’re a lot better team now than we were two months ago.
“We’ve got a new front wing that we tested for the first time in Russia, and we’ve got a new rear wing that we’ll race for the first time in Barcelona. We won’t have big changes on a set schedule. We’ll introduce new parts when we feel we’ve made enough gains. New parts from our development will trickle in every few races, just like every other team does.
“We started to run with the new front wing it in China, but we had some other issues to work out so we decided not to focus on the new front wing. We left the old wing on because we knew that the original wing worked. We re-tested it during FP1 in Russia and both drivers liked it. It makes the car more stable around the track in cornering, so we’ve decided to use the new wing going forward.”
The Barcelona race weekend will allow the Haas F1 team to truly evaluate the progress they have made, from where they started pre-season, to where they are now. The squad will be hoping that the results show they are going from strength to strength.
